Thursday, 17 July 2014

Noisy desperation and the sexual revolution

It seems to me that the mass of modern men lead lives of noisy desperation - and the women even more so.

The possibility, the threat, even a discussion of any way of limiting their sexual freedoms in (almost) any way, seems to evoke something like panic - followed by wild fury.

The reason is presumably that sex is what modern people live for, what keeps them going - and it is only this which keeps them going.

Not so much actual sexual fulfilment; but hopes and dreams and the merest potential possibility of sexual fulfilment; and they do not want there to be anything - not marriage, not lack of marriage, not a family or dependents or responsibilites, not love nor hate nor fear; not gender, not age, not illness; not geographical location; not job not lack of a job; not even religion - nothing but nothing but nothing can be allowed to stand in the path of their one and only hope of their one and only slender chance of the one and only something that sounds like happiness.

A society of unmatched comfort, convenience, resources - yet has there ever been so grossly impoverished a society of souls as are revealed by the modern attitude to sex?

10 comments:

"has there ever been so grossly impoverished a society of souls as are revealed by the modern attitude to sex?"

Perhaps, Canaan and Sodom come to mind. But I would definitely agree we are at a low point.

Even Confucius taught against the aggrandizement of sex as a moral evil, so this is not merely a Christian belief. You are right that most people (some without realizing it) in the western world live for sex and the promise of sex. It's why they don't care about being spied on, having their drinks regulated, being taxed for services they will never receive, etc.

As long as they are sexually as free as possible (and we are seeing the next sick movement to legitimize child sex and polygamy), people don't care what other tyrannies they must endure. Sex has been made into a false god, one of the foremost on the pantheon of progressivism.

In an ideal society with Theonomic legal structures and a highly Christian culture, sex would be something never discussed in public, kept in the privacy of the home between a husband and his wife. Anything else would be correctly viewed as degenerate.

@MC - "we are seeing the next sick movement to legitimize child sex and polygamy)"

I would be appalled, but not at all surprised, that if Leftism does not collapse soon the posthumous condemnation of Jimmy Savile may well be reversed by the liberal elites - and his reputation be remade as a martyr of sexual liberation.

We already have polygamy - in the sense that multiple serial marriage is a particularly vicious and destructive form of polygamy; and happens, openly - as the norm, at the very highest levels of the ruling elites.

Plus of course that there are no social or legal sanctions against multiple simultaneous promiscuity out-with marriage etc.

The sad thing is that for most people, it is all fantasy. They are not having constant glorious sex with multiple attractive partners. The "revolution" (like so many other revolutions) primarily benefited a few people at the top of the chain - mainly high status males. The great majority of men and women were better off solely from the standpoint of access to a sexual partner under monogamy - which of course had many other social and cultural advantages as well.

Great, succinct post, Bruce. We saw exactly this sort of thing during the last American election - even here in Canada, where people were merely commenting on it - particularly with regard to the issue of the contraception mandate. The raw, thundering fury is hard to make sense of except in light of what you've written.

Being the Anglophile that I am, I've recently been reading a first-rate book about the Wars of the Roses. It's incredible to read about a time when society well and truly expected, and respected, Christian chastity as a fundamental axiom.

The possibility, the threat, even a discussion of any way of limiting their sexual freedoms in (almost) any way, seems to evoke something like panic - followed by wild fury.

What we see here - particularly for women, for whom this effect is particularly pronounced - is not just a passion for sex, or for the potential or promise of "good sex". What we see here - as we saw during the Romney campaign - is the female hatred of legitimate male authority.

The first chapters of Genesis teach us that hell hath no fury like that of a woman rebelling against legitimate authority - it's visceral and wild. That's where much of this "noisy desperation" comes from.

@SJ - Well, let's say that men and women are different; and what counts as authority for one sex does not for the other. Society is just insofar as both types of authority coincide.

In a nutshell, women accord authority to (what they subjectively recognize as) the peer group of other women of the type they aspire to be. In practice this peer group is a construct of the mass media.

In modern societies, women are (as a group - and this is objectively measurable) grossly manipulated by the mass media/ leftist complex - and are behaving in a multitude of ways that multiply disadvantage themselves - from extreme self mutilation to near total sterility.

Why are the mass media doing this to women? It is not random. Because the mass media is evil, the main source of evil in modernity - strategically-evil - and evil means destructive of good.

@AT - The ethic of modernity is a kind of sloppy utilitarianism - that is 'good' which *tends* to promote the greatest happiness/ least suffering of the greatest number/ the people who matter.

The sum of gratifications can never be settled - and cannot even be measured - and depends of probabilities and predictions... so in practice can be used to justify absolutely anything - including deliberate infliction of misery, pain, despair...